He starts by saying he doesn't know what is best for other people. But we know it is best if a person has food and shelter and education and freedom from violence and abuse. We know it is best if a person is not raised in a slum surrounded by poverty. We know it is best to care for your child and not neglect it because you have to work two jobs and the father is in prison. We know quite a bit about what is best for other people.
He doesn't know if dying from a drug overdose at 28 is better than not dying by a drug overdose at 28. That one is amazing.
He then says the government is the only thing allowed to use force. That is the recipe for totalitarianism.
The people have the right to use force to make the government responsive to their needs. They have the right to force the government to listen to them. First through actions that disrupt and then, as a last resort, if that is not enough, through actions that cause harm. But a police state makes that impossible. A government that uses the police to violently end dissent is not a free society.
He then says the government should only use guns in ways HE would use guns contradicting his first statement that he doesn't know what is best for other people. He understands it is best to not be killed or raped.
Then he equates a society that wants libraries and taxes people to pay for them to pointing a gun to somebodies head.
He says dogmatically and without argument that "taxation is using violence". And then he says that because taxation, paying for the things that create a decent society, is not voluntary it is equivalent to theft. How paying for the things that make a decent society, like libraries, becomes theft is unknown. Is paying for a car theft?
He says that his nonsense is the "high level" "theoretical" part of Libertarianism.
He is a clear example of the irrationality of Libertarian thinking.
Although his thinking is better than most Republican thinking which is that the most rich should make all the rules. The Democrats, except for Bernie, are very far down the path to this conclusion as well.
He then says the biggest part of Libertarianism is stopping corporate welfare, again fully knowing what is best for others. When this became the biggest part of Libertarianism is unknown, but it is a good idea that people like Bernie have been talking about for decades. I went to a lecture by Ralph Nader in 1991 where he warned of the "corporatization" of the US.
He then says the solution is to make the government small enough so that corruption does not pay. He says "give the government little enough so there is not enough to steal from it". He says the rich multi-nationals are being buoyed up by the government. I think what he is saying is true but the solution is not to make the government smaller. The solution is to make the government responsive to the people, not corporations. The solution is public financing of campaigns and limits to what politicians can take from corporations and the removal of corporate loopholes in the tax code. Not by starving a corrupted government which will take from all other things first and from corporations last.
